:This morning he asked one of my staff where you were!: the local Leareth tells Bella. :I suspect that means it would be a more productive time for you to visit him than before: 

Coming. Alt-Van wants to know what you have for shielding objects in transit, by the by. Pop.

Leareth comes out to meet her. "I have some books I can dig up for him, although reading them to him over the earcuff does not seem very efficient." 

"It really doesn't, hm. Could you excerpt bits?"

"If you give us a couple of days, we can make a summary of only the most relevant parts that do not duplicate anything he already knows. If we wished to save you time, you could perhaps lend the earcuff to one of my staff who has met the local Vanyel?" 

"...maybe, yeah. I have been fairly defensive of it but perhaps we're past that being reasonable."

Nod. "You can decide after we go through and draft a summary - though an advantage if I were to speak with him directly is that I could answer his questions immediately without a relaying step. Anyway, we can discuss that later." 

He heads down the hall, reaches the other Leareth's room. "You were asking after both of us? We are here now." 

Leareth shifts in bed a little to look at them. He doesn't say anything, but he definitely seems to be paying attention. 

"Hello," she says, taking a seat.

He looks kind of dubiously at her, and goes on waiting. 

"When you asked where I was, I was in Haven," she says after a silence.

That really doesn't clarify much at all! Sigh. "Are you a Herald." 

"No. The Companion's not my Companion, just a friend."

What. "I was not aware Companions did that." He clears his throat and inches toward a position that slightly more resembles sitting up. "Are you planning to explain what is supposed to have happened here." 

"It wasn't clear you'd like us to. If you want, I can summarize now."

Leareth waits until it's apparent that she wants an answer from him, and then nods. 

"There appear to be two Velgarths, yours later than this one, and two Ardas, the one you were in again later than the other by much more. I'm from a fifth plane called Materia. In a magical accident I landed in the younger Valinor and lived there for about two decades and then the Valar banished me back to Materia, where for some reason no time had passed and I just had the same magical accident over again, this time landing in the younger Haven. When I'd come up with a Materian-style spell to try to regroup with my Quendi friends and try to find some universe more generally hospitable, it mistargeted, landing me and Sayshen, my Companion friend, in your cell in Angband. I recognized the aesthetic of Utumno because I've done Mindhealing-like therapy on Utumno survivors before, and got out of there with you right away and brought you to the Leareth here."

That makes astonishingly little sense, but Leareth isn't inclined to helpfully critique Melkor's storytelling for him, so he just looks flatly at her.

(It's so unnecessarily complicated, which he wants to say 'isn't Melkor's style' although of course that isn't a conclusive argument for anything, if conclusive arguments were still a trustworthy concept at all. Also it has a lot of details that seem...unnecessarily difficult to fake?) 

"Why were you doing things to my mind before." There was such an inexplicable lack of followup on that. 

"I un-obscured some memories of yours. And I looked for instances of you doing magic other than the Gates that your allies already knew about, since they wanted to know if there was anything they missed. And I calmed you down when you were panicking. Since you weren't very responsive I've been relying on what your alternate universe version has to say about what's justifiable but if you want to contradict him you can, I operate under a professional oath about consent."

Leareth goes quiet for a while. 

"Were there?" he says dully, not because he's going to believe the answer, but - it's something he would want to know, if any of this were real, and there's such a mess of memories that he hasn't even begun sorting through all of the earlier ones. 

"No."

For some stupid inexplicable goddamned reason he's crying, now, even though it's not like any of what she's saying matters. Leareth turns away and curls up and waits to see if they're going to leave or start doing things to him or what. 

She waits. Glances at Local Leareth.

:I am a bit confused. I suspect it bothers him that he did magic for Melkor at all? I cannot really tell what he wants out of this conversation, aside from it being better than utter boredom, but...I at least have an impression that he is thinking now, which means that possibly it would help to provide evidence that Melkor could not fake. ...If I were him, though, I would be so incredibly skeptical about your explanation. It does not sound at all like a plausible set of events in the real world: 

I can't really help that!